THE AMBIVALENCES OF BECOMING A PROFESSOR IN NEOLIBERAL ACADEMIA

Introduction

PhD students: Tell us what is it like to be a professor?

Professor: I don’t know.... Everything goes so fast that I feel I really have to think about this before I can say anything. It’s confusing, that I can say.

PhD student: Why don’t you write an article about becoming a professor?

The present text was inspired by the above conversation in a pub after a daylong workshop on

bringing critical thinking into life in the Academia. The doctoral students involved in the discussion

were part of the research community that the young professor was associated with. The question

proposed to her in the pub remained in her mind, and after a long consideration she decided to write

the proposed article. She had become curious about the process of academicity, where being a

culturally intelligible academic was understood as a citational and reiterative discursive practice

within multiple and contradictory power-knowledge relations, as Eva Bendix Petersen has written

(Petersen 2008, 56). For the young professor academicity was about doing, a continuous cultural

and discursive practice by which the discourse produces the effects that it names (see also Butler

1990). Throughout her ‘academic career’ she had inquired about the possibilities to know and to

theorize, and then wanted to write about the complexity and multidimensionality of academicity.

She wanted to write about the process of seeing what framed her seeing, as a process of establishing

a dialogue with readers about which discursive policy was being followed (see Lather 1993). As a

young professor, she wanted to create something interesting but also politically relevant.

As a consequence, this paper became a mode of the drifting (Kurki & Ikävalko, forthcoming;

Ikävalko & Kurki 2013) of experiences of a young female academic, a critical scholar who recently

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became a tenure track professor of social justice and equality in education in a Nordic ‘model-

country of equality’.1 Tenure track meant that she had to satisfy certain prerequisites in order to

acquire a permanent professorship. She began as an assistant professor after which time she could

apply for an associate professorship – if she passed the evaluation process. The prerequisites

included publishing international (English-language) articles in top scientific journals (English2),

demonstrating leadership, developing teaching, supervising doctoral students and obtaining funding.

She was evaluated by a board which included several professors from the Faculty. The system was

still quite new to her, and to the University as well so it was not easy for her to find exact

information about the process and what precisely was expected of her. She just knew she had to

produce much of everything.

By utilizing a written diary, notes from meetings, discussions in academia, and extracts from her

lectures she wanted to ask how discursive constructions related to academicity took hold of her

body, took hold of her desire, and how certain discursive constructions were appropriated while

others were discarded, relegated as irrelevant or even threatening (Petersen 2008, 55). She wanted

1 The university where the professor worked launched a tenure track system for teaching and research personnel, with the aim of enhancing the

predictability, competitiveness and attractiveness of an academic career and to promote international collaboration at the University. A person may be

chosen fot the tenure track system if no more than 10 years have elapsed since he or she took a doctoral degree and if the person in question has

acquired promising scientific and other merits during this period. In addition, research work and teaching experience, work in other countries and

other international experience are regarded as important. It is also of importance that the applicant shows that he or she can obtain complementary

research funding. A person who is accepted to the tenure track system is employed as Assistant Professor for fixed-term employment, during which

time his or her performance is monitored and evaluated according to the criteria defined when concluding the employment contract. Success in the

evaluation will lead to new fixed-term employment as Associate Professor with the aim of eventually obtaining tenure as a Professor.

2 The publications are rated in accordance with the Publication Forum which operates within The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. Its purpose

is to maintain and develop the classification of scientific publication channels. The purpose of the Publication Forum system is the qualitative

classification of scientific publication channels in all scientific fields. http://www.tsv.fi/julkaisufoorumi/english.html?lang=en.

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to inquire about the conditions of academicity’s emergence and operation. She aimed to write the

article in many ways, starting from different places, then from the middle, trying each time to catch

‘some of the threads of the rhizome’ (see also Guttorm 2014).

As someone who took societal power relations seriously, the young professor wanted to be

continually aware of the discourses through which people speak about themselves and are spoken

about by others (Davies 2005). She chose to focus on her experience as a young professor at the

centre of a particular situation. She believed that this would help her to find the fault lines in

academic discourses, break them open and then find new discourses and subject positions to be able

to continue as a critical scholar and politically active academic. She chose to write in the third

person in order to create a critical distance from some events that were difficult to write about. By

writing in the third person she tried to avoid ‘too easy’ ideas about voice, voice as present, coherent

and stable. She wanted to find a way to trouble her own voice that engaged with the power relations

that produce voices (Mazzzei & Jackson 2009). In the article, the concept of experience was not

used in the sense of individuals having experiences (or the origin of an explanation), but about

academic subjects who constitute themselves and are constituted as experiencing subjects (Davies et

al. 2006, 17).

Of becoming

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) thinking on rhizomes enabled her to envision an article as

something always becoming, in the middle, in between, as an assemblage and as a multiplicity. As

with Deleuze, she also saw subjectivity as nomadic and rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari

1980/1987). Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre has called this the subject undone (St. Pierre, 2004).

Theoretical resources from the work of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith

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Butler, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Patti Lather, Bronwyn Davies and Elisabeth Adams St.

Pierre provided a rather intriguing opportunity to take the notion of power and the patterns of power

of academicity seriously. For the young professor, particularly interesting was to see how they

shaped academic subjects.

As Bronwyn Davies and her colleagues argue: ‘Encounters with poststructuralism enables the

subject to see itself in all its shifting, contradictory multiplicity and fragility, and also to see the

ongoing and constitutive force of the multiple discourses through which it takes up its existence’

(Davies et al. 2006, 91). Or as Rosi Braidotti (1994) wrote in Nomadic Subjects, we do not speak

languages, but languages speak us. She was keen on poststructural theory because it constantly

challenged her to rethink what she was doing - about research, about knowledge, and how to

understand the world. Feminist research helped her realize that for the researcher no outside

positions were available. Hunting for a more liberating or emancipatory approach to determining

“right or wrong” with respect to academicity was only going to reproduce the problems that

academic work was already facing.

As several researchers had already argued, becoming a recognizable subject in academia means

learning how to present oneself the “right way” (Davies 2005; Petersen 2008). Accordingly, once a

professor is categorized as such, she soon learns how to belong to that particular category, and thus

become submissive to her professorship-ness. If one does not succeed in producing the right kind of

discourse, the responsibility remains a problem for the individual herself. The young professor had

become aware of this well beforehand, so instead of just settling these doubts passively, she decided

to work them out by choosing a method that would allow her to utilize her experiences in academia.

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She was excited about the idea of becoming. Judith Butler had written that

becoming is no simple or continuous affair, but an uneasy practice of repetition

and risks, compelled yet incomplete, wavering on the horizon of social being

(Butler 1997, 30; Petersen 2008). Butler’s and Davies’s accounts of subject and agency

provided a way of understanding agency as a subject-in-process, and as the redeployment and effect

of power (Butler 1997; Davies 1998). Butler had written that “the subject is neither a ground nor a

product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process” (Butler 1992, 13; Davies

2005, 1).

She hopefully thought that, accordingly, if academicity was a regulated process of repetition taking

place in discourses, it simultaneously meant that the possibility exists to repeat it differently.

Because the capacity to act was not a possession, there was no need for a pre-existing subject with

agency (Butler 1997; Pulkkinen 2003). When involved in academic discourses one was both

conditioned by and dependent on the prevailing norms, and at the same time needed to find one’s

way ethically and responsibly (c.f. Butler 2008). So it was the paradoxical simultaneity of

submission and mastery, and the related ambivalence, that was explored

(Davies 2006). The dual nature of subjection was so readily (mis)understood in

the binary structure of western languages as necessarily either submission or

mastery, but not both. The idea that began to take this article forwards was

that conditions of possibility for the subject itself required both. And while writing,

there was of course always frustration with the fixed meanings of language and the ways words

once put on a page reflected static positions. The negotiations needed not to be an either/or

dilemma, rather both/and (see also Author 2009).

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The young scholar had recently become acquainted with concepts from what is known as the

affective turn (Bjerg & Staunaes 2011; Massumi 2002). She was interested in seeing how

performing academicity seemed to energize the register of affectivity. Bjerg et al. referred to

Massumi (2002) by talking about how the subject was managed through offers of being moved by a

special affectivity or intensity, which in turn refers to the increase and decrease of tensions and

quality in affects, atmosphere, senses and emotions. So for further specification of the vitalization,

forces and leeway or lines of flight that are implied by academicity she added the production of

affectivity to her analysis. In her definition of affect she agreed with Massumi (2002), who

described how the concept of affectivity includes moods, sensations, sense perceptions and

sentiments that affect and move us in different ways. The use of the word ‘affect’ rather than

‘feeling’ was an attempt to appreciate intensities as expressed in the body (Bjerg et al. 2011).

Revisiting the data and analysis

The young professor became interested in the work of Precarias a la Deriva, which was a

collaborative initiative between research and activism arising from the feminist social center La

Eskalera Karakola in Madrid. She first heard about it from her PhD students as a mode of drifting

(Ikävalko et Kurki 2014; Kurki and Author 2014). She learned that Precarias a la Deriva was a

group of feminist activists who refused to sit still and instead chose a method that would take them

on a series of itineraries through the metropolitan circuits of precarious work. The group had written

that these derives (drifting) through the city defied the division between work and life, production

and reproduction, public and private, to trace the spatial-temporal continuum of existence, the

double (or multiple) presence. By utilizing various kinds of data (e.g. discussions, reflections, video

and audio-recordings), they went out with the hope of communicating the experience and the

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hypotheses they might derive from it, taking their own communication seriously, not only as a tool

of diffusion but as primary material for politics (Precarias a la Deriva 2004).

Inspired by this kind of mode of drifting in the same way her doctoral students had been inspired

earlier, she revisited and reconsidered her data. Mode of drifting she understood as a research that is

embodied in different times, places and spaces (Ikävalko & al. 2013). She decided that no data was

to be considered as evidence of ‘truth’, and no data was given precedence over any other. She began

by gathering a number of informal discussions from academia. In addition, she utilized memories

from these encounters while keeping in mind that this kind of data could be considered

“incoherent”. She understood data to be something that was always partial, incomplete, and always

in the process of re-telling and re-membering (Jackson & Mazzei 2012; Kurki & Author 2014;

Ikävalko & al. in press).

In her article, the emphasis on language referred to a domain of struggles: conflicts over what was

or was not true and who had the power to pronounce the truth. The focus, therefore, was on the

effects, what language does, and what it enables academics to imagine and to do to themselves as

well as others. This helped the young professor to write about discourse as a fairly consistent

system of meanings circulating in policies, practices and everyday conversations in academia

(Foucault 1976/1990). What was considered as important, what was focused on, what was left

unsaid, what was regarded as central and as marginal, was defined by discourses (Foucault 2000).

Understanding discourse in this sense enabled her to analyse the structure of the forms of power

connected to the politics and practices of becoming a professor. It also allowed looking for more

fluid perspectives concerning both the subject and agency. Furthermore, for her, combining an

affective with poststructural turn enabled expanding the concept of performativity as a way of

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thinking in relation not only to language, but also affectivity and materiality (see also, Bjerg et al.

2011).

The constant ambivalences

There is hardly anything about You. You need to show from the beginning that You

have created this, You have done this, You have led this…You need to put yourself in

the centre. (Feedback received from some of the young professor’s colleagues on her

application before submitting it, 2012)

It already began while sitting alone at her desk on a summer morning when she decided to apply for

the professorship. ‘Now or never’, she thought. She wrote the application over a period of two

weeks, carefully writing and rewriting. Her mother had just died two months earlier and she sadly

dreamed about discussing this with her. Yes, your daughter is applying to become a professor, how

about that Mom! As part of her application she was requested to submit a work plan for the next

five years. She wrote enthusiastically about the importance of acknowledging power and

strengthening collectivity and democracy. She realized how precious and unique this professorship

was. She wanted to use it to create a stronger critical and democratic community which because of

academic capitalism and constant competition currently seemed to be lacking at the moment. She

was already excited about Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea of rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari

1980) and dreamed about the community as rhizomatic. She thought that her professorship would

provide resources and enough authority for the kind of development she hoped for the whole

community, even for someone who was young, female and a critical scholar.

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But she also knew it would sound naïve. She had exactly the same feeling after her colleague

commented on her application. She quickly shortened the parts concerning collectivity and

democracy. She was aware she had to perform individuality, effectiveness, and the ability to be in

charge because that was what performing academicity meant. She wrote the words ‘I have done’, ‘I

have created’, ‘I have developed’, feeling shame and betrayal due to neglecting the most important

lesson she had learned from critical research, that knowledge is always produced collectively. The

biggest struggle started from exactly there, she thought later. She began to struggle to achieve and

maintain recognition as a legitimate and relevant subject – in relation to others and, simultaneously,

in relation to herself, which was sometimes contradictory as Petersen has written about scienticity

and academic subjects (Petersen 2008).

…and, once again, these achievements demonstrate academic standing and leadership.

She appears highly active and proficient, capable of becoming a leading figure in terms of research and teaching.

The candidate shows strong leadership.

(Extracts from her tenure professorship evaluation, 2013)

The whole application process could be thought of as an operation of the mechanisms of power

where the soon-to-become professor served as a vehicle of complex power/knowledge relations.

The illusion of individual autonomy within academia was created through the process as a

consequence of the constant ‘autonomisation’ and ‘responsiblisation’ of the self. The young woman

had learned to utilise the same discourse, as a way to perform ‘discourse virtuosity’, as she herself

had conceptualised the ambivalent position of being a critical scholar and a feminist researcher

(Author 2009). She also became aware that not everyone was happy with her nomination.

Competition for the position had been fierce, and had created tension in the community. One person

approached her implying that she was not chosen because of her expertise but rather because she

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was able to perform neoliberal ideals of individual leadership. She chose to ignore such comments

as part of letting off of steam following the tension her nomination had created. But she also knew

she was performing leadership in accordance with what was expected of her. Much had happened

before this application process when becoming an academic and being subject to, and vehicle for, a

myriad of discourses and subject positions (Davies and Harré 2000).

You need to toughen yourself. People will envy you and challenge you constantly but you must avoid showing feelings in order to look strong. In difficult situations, just try to look as neutral as possible.

Now it’s all about you, only you. You’re the boss.

Everyone will look up to you now.

Yes, you will be watched.

The extracts above were meant to be friendly advice for the young professor from colleagues and

friends after she had assumed her new position. She also asked for advice because she felt she had

suddenly been thrown into the deep end and had to show she could swim. She thanked her

colleagues for the advice as a good girl should, replying that she would try to do her best. At the

same time she felt uncertain and devastated. She knew she was in an ambivalent position. On the

one hand she had to perform individualistically but on the other she wanted to put her position into

a more political use, as a resource to be utilised by the academic community.

What she realised clearly was the fact that before her nomination it was all about academic merit.

After the nomination it was more about her behaviour and even how she looked.

You might want to consider more carefully how you write your emails.

It is always good to look as positive as possible.

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Have you considered the length of your hair? For a Professor long hair like that, I

would consider it.

Try to avoid clothes that look too feminine or too masculine.

Her actualisation as a viable and acceptable professor became to consist of simultaneously

mastering discourses of gratitude, enthusiasm and effectiveness as well as of collectivity and

criticality. As someone who had been interested in critical research and collective action for a long

time, this felt difficult, but she realised that in order to be heard in academia, and in order to create

leeway for the more critical approach she wanted to realise, she had to create a type of discourse

virtuosity (Author 2009). In other words, she had to know how to master and submit in various

situations.

Very soon her working hours grew longer, she began to attend meetings every day, her steps

became more rapid and she took on even more academic duties. She said ‘ok, I’ll do it’ perhaps too

many times. Because of her long working hours she began to be annoyed by any kind of

disturbances because it made it harder for her to concentrate. She started to work at home as much

as possible where she felt she could still think and write. She wrote her text mainly at home on

Sunday mornings, the most peaceful time for her to think, read and write. In her office she placed

Elin Danielson Gambogi’s picture After Breakfast to remind her of the importance of doing nothing.

She liked to look at the picture each day because it made her slow down by challenging the idea of

non-stop productivity. The painting made her question work and its benefits. In the end it was just

work.

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She was aware that through her initial submission to academicity, she constantly became a subject

of knowledge, desire and agency. She came to know certain things to be ‘true. Further, she had

become passionately attached to certain ideas about what constitutes good professorship (cf.

Petersen 2008). In affectivity terms, academicity worked through her within an ambiguous affective

economy of both negative and positive affects. This ambiguity was the prerequisite for producing

not only self-managing subjects who can handle themselves in actual situations, but also self-

improving subjects who create even better versions of themselves (Bjerg et al. 2011). She took on

even more responsibilities and duties. In order to fight back, she wanted to make this visible by

talking about it and by asking her colleagues to pay attention to her behaviour.

Professor: If it looks like I will become some kind of bastard and I don’t recognise it

somehow, do you promise you will mention this to me? Because I am afraid that I

would not recognise it.

Professor: Aren’t you worried that we become bastards after getting this much power in our hands?

Colleague: Of course we become. You cannot avoid that.

Professor: Oh…I’d still like to think otherwise…

She was aware of the demand to be active and grateful. She had already long ago learned to perform

situational flexibility when adapting to the demands in order to continue in the academia. This

meant a willingness to accept short-term contracts, long working hours, critiques about critical and

feminist research being narrow and one-sided, and sometimes keeping one’s mouth shut (although

that had always been especially hard for her). This was all about learning to carry herself and her

body in academically acceptable ways. She knew academic precarity was exactly like this - a

condition of contingency and inability to predict. Hence, being flexible in the face of academic

opportunities had nothing to do with the meritocratic idea of ‘everything-is-possible’ mind-set, but

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rather constant insecurity, indignity and submitting to the greater discipline of precarious politics

(see also Kurki & Author 2014).

Encounters

She walked in the hallway and saw two of her colleagues talking to each other. She

was eager to hear what they were saying because they both looked serious. When her

colleagues saw her approaching they suddenly were silent. When she walked by her

colleagues looked at her, and nodded, with the whole conversation having ended. She

acted like she did not notice it and chose to smile at them while walking away.

The above incident was painful for the young professor and she felt lonely while walking by but

tried to think of it in terms of power relations. She knew research has already shown what happens

in gendered and hierarchical organisations. She recalled research showing the problems and

challenges particularly young women positioned as leaders, constantly face (e.g. Husu, Hearn,

Lämsä & Vanhala, 2011; Lämsä & Sintonen 2001). She forced herself to think of encounters like

this as discursively shaping realities, not something to be taken personally. This was something she

had began to tell herself, not to take things personally. She also reminded herself that these same

discourses shaped her own experience and the ways she performed her position.

The most difficult incident by far occurred one day when she read a memo from a meeting that she

was unable to attend but which was partly about her and her tenure track plans. For the application

process, she was requested to provide an exact plan for her professorship. She thought she was

doing well enough because of the positive feedback her plans had created within the evaluation

board and community. When she was nominated, she had a round of negotiations with senior

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colleagues who said the plans looked great and that they ‘were in’. She trusted this and still

remembered how enthusiastic she felt, and could not sleep because of all the excitement.

The memo from the meeting changed her mood completely. It said things like ‘Let’s see how it

goes/let’s not dismiss her plans yet, let’s wait and see’, and also ‘no one person can decide in a

democratic community how to do things’. She read those lines many times and tried to understand

the message that was making her feel she was excluded from the community. She also tried to

understand why she felt suddenly ashamed, because she had not done anything wrong. She

understood this feeling after reading what Sarah Ahmed has written about shame. According to

Ahmed, shame can be experienced as the affective cost of not following the scripts of normative

existence (Ahmed 2004, 107). In addition to shame she also felt devastation, because of the fear of

not living up to what was recognised as the standard of the community. Some of her friends and

colleagues reminded her that all this was politics; because of her nomination tables were turning

and the statements were echoing that. She realised this and keeping it in mind read the same memo

again but feeling sad and helpless because she did not know how to answer. These were the people

she thought of when writing the plan, her colleagues. Again she told herself not to take it

personally. When later revisiting this experience she realised that shame seemed to be an inevitable

player when improving the self (Bjerg et al. 2011) in performing academicity.

She talked about her own fears to her colleagues:

Professor: I fear that people stop talking to me, I fear that people will turn their backs and start talking about me without telling me straight what the problem is.

She also knew that being openly critical and feminist created situational tensions. She was advised

by some of her colleagues to keep a lower profile with her feminist aspirations so that she would not

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acquire a negative reputation. When she appeared in the media talking about the importance of

equality perspectives she received threatening emails afterwards, which she would know to

instantly delete. In the ‘model country of equality’ it seemed quite a few feminist researchers

received such messages and it was not supposed to be taken too seriously. She especially thought of

one of those messages saying that people like her deserved to die. She wanted to write back, wanted

to understand why this one person thought she should die, but was advised by colleagues not to do

so.

And at the same time she did not want to care about this because criticality and her work gave her

pride, it was the air she breathed and the discourse that provided her with strength and the means to

go on. She considered criticality, politics and creating collectivity more important than ever, and

because of that also her own work, every second of it. Her secret strategies were to work hard and

this way to legitimitate her both privileged and vulnerable position and, in parallel, make room for

for criticality and collectivity.

Of course she was aware that she held a power position. She wrote newspaper articles, gave

interviews, contributed to social media and arranged political events as well as encouraged activism

inside and outside academia. She wrote passionately with her colleagues about marketisation, power

and resistance, and how in the neoliberal order, the notion of self-responsibility described the

characteristics of a desirable subject who is answerable, accountable, manageable, reliable,

dependable and independent (Kurki & Author, 2014; Ikävalko & Author, 2011; Author and

Siivonen, 2014). She understood self-responsibility as a socio-cultural construction, and as a

product and process of academicity. She knew it drove people to focus more on themselves, and

that it leads to the internalisation of the idea that societal problems and socio-economic realities are,

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in fact, the responsibility of the individual. She talked about this, wrote about it and even dreamt

about it.

Towards a political agency and counter-politics

As for the goings on with the ethics and politics, I hope you do not get too wrapped up in any of it. There is nothing to win by getting involved and a lot to win by doing nothing.

It’s also good that you don’t make too many enemies because you never know who is going to evaluate you later.

I’ve started to write shorter messages. They are safer.

Because of your nomination, the power relations will change. Now it’s the time to influence.

It might be that we are the last generation that is able to change something in

academia. But if it looks like we are going down, let’s make sure we go down

shooting.

She continually received friendly advice from her academic colleagues and friends not to get too

involved or, vice versa, to fight back and have an effect. This was of course also about performing

academicity, and helped in understanding how the more experienced academics re-achieved it as

well as how they contributed to maintain (or disrupt) various practices and procedures that are

‘obviously’ part of this particular kind of social and discursive practice (see also Petersen 2008,11).

Encouraged by the latter, she found herself several times in a difficult position when trying to argue

for fairness but realising on some occasions that she either sounded naïve or was seen as an angry

feminist. In the ‘model country of equality’ angry feminist was especially a label that women

working for the promotion of equality chose to avoid (Brunila 2009).

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She felt she could not always act like a ‘good girl’ but perhaps, too many times, chose to fight

battles she simply could not win. It was all still too new to her, and she wished she had the

experience that would make allow her to act in a more laid-back (like the male professors she knew

who seemed to do so ‘naturally’). She knew all too well that, as a young professor as well as a

critical and feminist scholar, she was quite alone and indeed in a vulnerable position. In her research

diary she wrote the following about working in academia:

It has oddly started to feel like a struggle to survive, this is what people keep saying. Let’s try to survive this day, let’s try to survive this meeting, this seminar, this visit. It’s like a survival game.

She read Bronwyn Davies (2005) who argued that the neoliberal discourse had shifted governments

and their subjects towards seeing survival being seen as an individual responsibility. This was a

crucial element of the neoliberal order, Davies wrote, the removal of dependence on the social

combined with the dream of wealth and possessions for each individual who gets it right. According

to Davies, vulnerability was closely tied to individual responsibility, and was central to neoliberal

subjectivity – workers were disposable, and there was no obligation on the part of the ‘social fabric’

to take care of the disposed. Therefore the neoliberal subject became both vulnerable and

necessarily competitive. The notion of responsibility, therefore shifted to responsibility for

individual survival. This survival was constructed not as moral survival but as economic (Davies

2005, 9).

I am constantly struck by my, and my colleagues’ struggle to work within and against so many rules and structures. I keep saying we have to learn to utilise the system that utilises us, but really, how do we learn to simultaneously deconstruct and then reconstruct alternatives? How do we teach something like this? How do we take this into our research? (Notes in the young professor’s research diary).

Driven by this, the young professor wrote in her article the following: ‘It seems neoliberalism has

found yet another pervasive new way to harness the whole personality for its use, shaping it more

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effectively in order to shape a properly flexible and adjustable subjectivity’ (Author 2012a, 2014).

She refused to think in terms of survival because she realised how the neoliberal discourse tended to

strengthen the Cartesian idea of subjectivity, the idea of the human as essential, as malleable and as

potential. The idea of the position of survivalist offered to academics was indeed tied to this

Cartesian, essential and autonomous self.

Together with her colleagues, she wrote that as long as this kind of approach remained untouched it

would be able to shape and retool academics to conform to it without using force or domination. In

this way, flexibility and self-responsibility meant a diminished self, as well as limited possibilities

to speak and to be heard by ensuring that one implicitly learns to find mistakes in, and blame only,

oneself (Author & Siivonen 2014, Author & Ikävalko, 2011; Author, Mertanen, Mononen Batista-

Costa, in review). Deconstructing the idea of a stable, united and rational researcher needed to be

called for, because it was connected to the deconstruction of the humanistic idea of the ‘truth’ of

knowledge. It was both possible and crucial to look for alternative perspectives to this dualistic and

conventional image of subjectivity as stable, individualised and coherent.

At best, collective writing has been a process making the collective production of knowledge visible for us and at the same time it has displaced/removed the individual subject. Collective writing at its best has lead us to foreign grounds, where one cannot be certain about what is one’s own and what is not, where is the ‘I’ who writes, and where is something else.(Guttorm et al. 2014).

The above extract is from an article written together with twelve researchers (Guttorm et al. 2014)

from the young professor’s research community which endeavoured to challenge academic

capitalism and seek for a more collective approach. The group also fought back against the notion

of scientific hierarchies. For the young professor and her colleagues, it became crucial to keep

looking for ways to analyse academic activity as a site of constant negotiation and agency without

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an essentialist subject. This collective writing process was yet another example of seeing what

framed their seeing. It reminded her that problems concerning neoliberalism were not objects but

rather the products of different practices, policies and power relations, and therefore always

negotiable and changeable.

She wished that this kind of thinking could have implications for academia. Academics themselves

should look at neoliberalism more closely, at how neoliberalism works and with what kinds of

consequences. Being systematic in challenging the neoliberal orientation would also provide

academics with more possibilities for various kinds of agency in the whole of society. It would be

possible to transcend the dualistic order of compliance versus resistance, and take up the master

narratives as opposed to resisting them. Quoting Bronwyn Davies (2005, 13): ‘it is in our own

existence, the terms of our existence, that we need to begin the work, together, of decomposing

those elements of our world that make us, and our students, vulnerable to the latest discourse and

that inhibit conscience and limit consciousness”.

According to Youdell, resistance can still have the potential to shift the understanding of what and

whose knowledge counts and can be discussed, and what and whose knowledge is silenced,

discarded and erased (cf. Youdell 2011; see also Kurki & Author, 2014). Together with her doctoral

students she wrote that this does not mean that everyone should act together, but that enough

acts of resistance should be interweaving so that a collective effect is

registered (see also Butler & Athanasiou 2013, 180). Crucial to this is

acknowledging and recognising the critical voices related to academicity.

19

It is a privilege to be in a position like this to say these opening words, as it is a privilege to

hold the position of this kind of professorship. I hope we can think of this professorship (like all

the other professorships, lectureships, PhD positions and students related to this new research

centre) as an opportunity to create a more critical, collective and democratic community.

(From the young professor’s presentation in the opening of the research centre that was part of

her plans, in front of over 100 participants; one of the happiest moments thus far for her.)

She remained hopeful that, in spite of all kinds of ambivalences, the professorship as well as other

academic positions could be considered as a resource for resistance, a line of flight, a making of

space whilst simultaneously being suspicious of efforts to uncritically improve or develop, because

this is always done along axes that in themselves represent what is powerful and valuable within a

given context (Ropers-Huilman et al., 2010). Trying to work the professorship out with her

colleagues and students, or in Spivak’s terms sabotaging the system from within (Spivak 1996), was

making the professor feel enthusiastic and hopeful, almost what she recalled feeling when she

began writing her application for the professorship.

Critical thinking involves asking how we assert our rights to know. This focuses attention on

questions of power, on the limits of knowing and on the relation between knowledge and

power. This in turn hopefully helps us question and doubt our own presuppositions. (From

the young professor’s lecture in Bringing critical thinking into life in Academia workshop)

‘There is still relevance and meaning in this bloody academic work’, she told her trusted friends.

‘There are still political ways in which this position can be utilised’, she cried. Together with her

20

colleagues and students, she continued to look for ways to put ideas into research and teaching, to

put theory into work.

Conclusion

This article was an experiment, the beginning of something hopefully different, offering a leeway of

some kind. It was about acknowledging the complexities of our intentions and actions in Academia.

For the writer, it meant acknowledging uncertainties and the mechanisms of power in knowledge

and knowing regarding academicity. It was also a way to retain her political and ethical

commitment to feminism, while continuing to acknowledge the complex power relations she was

necessarily involved in. The young professor who appears in this text is both a competent self who

is socially and discursively constituted, but also a self who is spoken into existence as a reflexive

self (see also Petersen, 2008). The main argument of the article was that the choice stems not so

much from the individual but from the condition of possibility – the discourse which prescribes not

only what is desirable, but what is recognisable as an acceptable form of academicity. She also

wanted to argue that in spite of good and systematic intentions academic subjects cannot simply

choose to construct themselves or their doings differently, because choosing is also an effect of

power rather than a result of prior agency.

While finishing this text, she thought of performing academicity in a way that would challenge the

taken-for-granted framework by ‘working the ruins’ as some poststructural researchers have called

this approach (eg. Lather 1997). ‘The ruins’ are one term in a wider lexicon of disappointment that

has emerged regarding qualitative research. The ruins are also shorthand for the crumbling edifice

of Enlightenment values that have regulated theory and research for two centuries (St. Pierre &

Pillow 2000, Lather 1997). It is a belief in reason and progress, mediated access to truth, and the

agency of the centred, humanist self.

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Within the neoliberal discourse, performing academicity is informed by the view that the problem

which needs to be addressed is to be handled on an individual level, among individuals who are

similarly considered as stable, and coherent but necessarily vulnerable. What the young professor

wanted to also argue with her article was the importance of understanding how academicity as well

as her position was always a ‘becoming’ something that involved active doing. With the article she

wanted to argue that it was not the skillful and competent self who was discursively constituted, but

also the self who was spoken into existence as a reflexive self.

To become a professor in Academia means struggling with constant ambivalences. The very same

work that is considered in some situations as exciting and groundbreaking can be considered as

unworthy or even foolish in others. Working with and against so many power relations can be

exhausting. ‘Sweaty desire’ she wrote into her diary. ‘But on the other hand’ she wrote ‘I would

have not been able to produce this piece of writing without this academic position and without

being passionately attached’.

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